UI Request - Comparing differences between process-snapshots

Michael

29 Jan, 2018 07:41 PM

Frequently, when DevOps is deploying a release to Production they encounter the classic Warning:
--> "The deployment process has changed since this snapshot was taken."

This triggers a fire drill where dev, ops, and qa need to figure out what changed, when, and if the change is retro-actively required in previously issued releases. Generally the exercise results in dev identifying the small change and that the change is required going forward (vNext) but NOT needed last quarter's release. We have to manually download the json snapshots and load them into text diff tool. It's tedious and time consuming. It's awesome to have immutable snapshots, but we need UI features to compare and track changes.

PLEASE: Add UI tooling so that users can delta compare a release with others. Compare to any newer release, older release, and latest defined process steps.

The following are NON-starters:
* restricting 'project-contributor' to a select few. we tried that and result in change-committee headaches with gate-keepers. even then for auditing, we need to go back and look at the delta history.
* source control the json export of the projects. this requires additional process to trigger when to export and store in git. our auto release process can't support this
* push step logic in to powershell scripts into the feature's source control. we rely on many third party steps across a 100 projects -- not feasible to scriptify

Thanks for getting in touch! Something we are looking to implement in Q2 this year is something we are currently calling Compare releases. It is still a bit early to provide any further information on this, but hopefully we can have some public info on it out soon. This will most likely be a blog post so keep an eye out!

Let me know if you have any further thoughts or questions here. I'll do my best to answer. :)